Tuesday, November 17, 2009

More than one year after Barack Obama won the presidential election, and nearly ten months after his inauguration, the current administration's efforts to improve our food safety system have stalled. For example:

We are still waiting to hear who will fill the key post of Undersecretary for Food Safety at USDA.

Food safety legislation, which passed the House on July 29th, is taking a back seat to health care reform and is unlikely to pass the Senate this year.

President Obama and his "team" have given very little concrete direction to legislators working on food safety reform. His Administration apparently prefers to lead by wishing. The Food Safety Working Group, announced by Obama in March 2009, published its list of food safety principles on July 1st:

If Hillary Clinton had won the Democratic Party nomination and the White House, she would not have relied on Congressional committees to draft legislation based on a wish list. Hillary would have sent a detailed draft Food Safety Modernization bill to Congress, and would have lobbied strenuously for its passage. Nor would she have allowed a key food safety position to remain vacant for 10 months.

I don't honestly know that Hillary would have done any better. It is one thing to say things and even write proposed policy changes while campaigning. It is quite another to actually get things done once elected. Don't get me wrong, I think Hillary would have been a good POTUS, and the nasty opposition may not have been as bad, but it still would have been there. She would have faced a lot of obstructionist opposition to everything she would have proposed, just like President Obama is. She also would have had the same eight-years-in-the-making mess to try to clean up upon taking office.

We have no way of knowing that Hillary's food safety proposals would have seen the light of day. The economy, the wars, and health care/health insurance have emerged as the top issues. Most everything else, including food safety, is taking a back seat to those problems. I don't think that things would have been much different under Hillary Clinton. I do think that things would have been much worse, however, if John McCain had been elected.

Hillary actually won the popular vote in the primary but the DNC (with the help of the MSM) found ways to steal the nomination from her. The powers that be wanted a puppet that would not outmanuever them and actually help the people, like Hillary would have.

Sadly, misogyny is alive and well in the U.S. and the dems are not different than the repubs when it comes to sexism.

Because of this extraordinary biased towards any powerful woman, Hillary was cheated out of what was rightfully her's and the will of the people because the men in power would rather destroy the village than have a woman in charge of it!

I have no doubt Hillary would have been one of the greatest presidents the U.S. has ever had. That loss is incalcuable to our country, who needs a strong leader now more than ever.

Unfortunately, we'll never have a chance to find out!. My home state (Vermont) went very strongly for Obama in the primary, so my vote wouldn't have made any difference, anyway. At least we have Hillary as SecState.